“Household wealth — the value of homes, stock portfolios and bank accounts, minus mortgage and credit-card debt and other loans — jumped 80% in the past decade. More than one-third of that gain — $16.2 trillion in riches— went to the wealthiest 1%, figures from the Federal Reserve show. Just 25% of it went to households in the middle- to upper-middle class. The bottom half of the population gained less than 2%.

Nearly 8 million Americans lost homes in the recession and its aftermath, and the sharp price gains since then have put ownership out of reach for many would-be buyers. For America’s middle class, the homeownership rate fell to about 60% in 2016 from roughly 70% in 2004, before the housing bubble, according to separate Fed data.”

The political implications of this inequality are clear: a loss of confidence in political systems and their legitimacy, leading to the rise of populist nationalism.